There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine.
...
Hess: So what shall we toast to, boys? I can blather on about “To health” or “To success,” but I’d like to do somethin’ a little less rote. Where you from, Brown Eyes?
Migs Mayfield: How ’bout a toast to Operation Cinder?
Hess: Now there’s a man who knows his history.
Mayfield: No, I don’t just know it. I lived it. I was in Burnin Konn.
Hess: Burnin Konn?
Mayfield: Mmm.
Hess: That was a hard day. I had to make many unpleasant decisions.
Mayfield: Yes, you did. Entire city gone in moments, along with everybody in it. We lost our whole division that day. Man, that was like 5-10,000 people.
Hess: Yep. All heroes of the Empire.
Mayfield: Yeah. And all dead.
Hess: Well, it’s a small sacrifice for the greater good, son.
Mayfield: Depends on who you ask, don’t you think?
Hess: [irritated] What you gettin’ at, trooper?
Mayfield: All those people, the ones who died, was it good for them? Hmm? Their families? The guys I served with? Civilians, those poor mud scuffers, died defending their homes, fighting for freedom. Was it good for them?
Hess: But we’ve outlasted them, son. They’re eating themselves alive. The New Republic is in complete disarray, and we grow stronger. You see, with the rhydonium you’ve delivered, we can create havoc that’s gonna make Burnin Konn pale by comparison. And then they’re gonna turn to us once again. You see, boys, everybody thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order. And when they realize that, they’re gonna welcome us back with open arms. Ah. To the Empire.
[Mayfield chuckles, then fires a blaster at Hess' chest, killing him instantly. He and Mando then shoot their way out of the mess hall] ~From The Mandalorian, Season 2, Ep. 7 "The Believer"
LO...and I can't stress this enough...Fucking L.
If you idiots needed a more obvious metaphor for how you...let alone the average fucking American of any color...are going to be treated until we stand up and make this shit stop, I don't think a better one could exist if God Himself came down from Heaven and engraved it on your fuckin' forehead with the same chisel that He did the Ten Commandments with.
We're all about to get fucked, yo, we're gonna get Oligarch-raided just like the Soviet Union did and all I can say is hopefully America simply falls apart due to disinterest and lack of a functioning Federal government just like the Soviet Union did.
But, personally I think there's too many fucking freaks out there that want to have a Civil War so they can try to shoot those neighbors that they don't like and then they get to unexpectedly go full FAFO when the neighbors shoot back.
There's a lot of idiots out there that think they're gonna use Trump to implement everything from a constant expanding profit margin for legacy media to Evangelical Theocracy to Tech-Bro-Oligarchy and an Earth-based version of The Empire from Star Wars. Well, all I can say is, they couldn't have picked a worse instrument for all that crap and I don't think anybody's gonna get what they think they want.
Not least because the people actually driving this clown car are neither Christians nor good businessmen.
But I absolutely do think all their efforts have a good chance of breaking us, not least because 30 years of Republican unreasonableness that started with Newt Gingrich have already done half the work for them. And then they will absolutely try again, using the smaller chunks.
And the truth is, as long as Other People are miserable, the people driving this thing from the other end (As in your basic MAGA blowhard) will be fine with it. It doesn't really matter so much who those Other People are, be they Mexican field-hands or White Urban Liberals...or really, even the MAGA Idiots themselves...so long as the social meme of misery and some degree of classism, racism and sexism is perpetuated.
It's that same old White Conservative problem as it ever was: I hate You, but I hate myself More, but I can't escape Myself so I hate (or at least act out against) you Even More.
And they don't care how bad they get fucked, so long as some even hypothetical or imaginary person somewhere else gets fucked more, or at least they get to pretend they have some kind of higher relative status towards some random Other. Meanwhile, in reality it's Vivek Ramaswamy that's laughing all the way to the bank.
And, like Russians burning down their own shit because they got counter-invaded by the Ukrainians, they don't care if they have to wreck their own society to act out on that grievance and rage against mostly-imagined enemies (that they use, mostly, to justify being shitty people to basically everybody.)
Let me put it another way; If this blows all the way up, America splits, and some conglomeration of Red States gets turned into a Russian satellite-state Cold War style, I think the only part of all that, that's going to be difficult for the Russians is convincing these fucking people (who mostly don't even speak proper English) to learn the Russian language.
I get the impulse, it's the acting on it that I see as problematic.
Bit by bit, far too many of us are gradually ceasing to be Americans and becoming instead whatever other "Identities" we cleave to, be they Leftists or Republicans or Trumpers or wannabe Social Media mavens or what the fuck ever. This shit is well into even disrupting families, think about that!
We have too many wannabe Gnostic cults.
We have too many fucking weirdos all preaching that they have some kind of cheat-code to life.
Somebody called those people the new Rasputins.
The Revolution is already underway, except it's not two sides, it's many.
Idiocracy, Priggish selfishness and the American tendency towards mysticism and to prioritize ideas over people (even when we no longer know what the words mean) may well have killed us as a unified nation. I often quote Reagan...but if you think about it, his and his wife's creepy belief in Astrology and (in a larger sense) inviting Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians into the American political mainstream even though he was neither is part of the DNA of what the hell got us here.
As was the Christians willingness to overlook that the Bible explicitly says Astrology is a Sin, in order to accept that gift of political power.
Now? Unless more of us get our head out of our ass and realize that the only fucking people who are going to profit from this shit are people who make more money in a day than most of us will ever see, and fucking come together and start doing something about that, we're all gonna get fucked over.
And it seems like the only way to stop this is for more people to have stable belief systems or just not be gullible shitty people...and therein lies the problem. I wonder if that's a habit too many of us can't kick.
But we have to try, anyway.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
Слава Україна!
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